Few living dramatists write big star parts. Peter Shaffer certainly has that capacity, which is one of the reasons why Amadeus, first seen in 1979, successfully endures. And, in christening Chichester's revamped main house, it offers the dual appeal of an operatic spectacle and a bravura display of saturnine jealousy from Rupert Everett as Salieri.

The theatre has been handsomely refurbished at a cost of £22m. The foyers are more spacious, the auditorium better raked and the once cramped backstage areas extended. But the play's the thing and Shaffer's study of the mediocre Salieri's attempt to destroy his detested rival, Mozart, not only sits well on the new, more flexible stage but seems part of the author's obsessive fascination with the relationship of man and God. It's there in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus and animates Amadeus in that Salieri challenges God to strike him down for his sin in destroying Mozart.

We see everything through the distorting lens of the aged Salieri's memory as he recalls events in 1780s Vienna. This gives the evening its dramatic shape and allows Shaffer inventive licence, but it also distorts historical reality. I am less worried by the idea that Mozart would have spoken in the same tone of infantile obscenity that he adopts in his letters than by the portrait of him as a lone genius. Scarcely any mention is made of his librettist, da Ponte, who claimed that it was he who foiled the Viennese plots against The Marriage of Figaro. And you'd never guess from the evidence here that Don Giovanni was conspicuously indebted to one of the two operas on the same subject that preceded it in 1787.

Even if Shaffer overplays the idea that Mozart was simply a potty-mouthed conduit for divine music, he has created a compelling drama about destructive envy. In Salieri he has also created a great role that changes according to the style of the individual actor. Where Scofield gave us silky irony, McKellen a touch of the stand-up comic and Suchet a self-accusing grief, Everett emphasises the gulf between Salieri's stately exterior and dark rage at the God he feels has cheated him. Everett cuts a tall, commanding figure who looks as if he belongs in a Viennese court. Underneath, however, we see the seething anger of the second-rater who alone feels capable of appreciating Mozart's prodigious gifts.

But one of the virtues of Jonathan Church's immensely stylish production, elegantly designed by Simon Higlett with a floor-pattern that reflects the building's hexagonal shape, is that it achieves the right balance between Salieri and Mozart. As the latter, Joshua McGuire looks like a stubby, overgrown baby and gives an astonishing display of whinnying arrogance that explains exactly why Mozart might have infuriated not just Salieri but the whole Viennese court: I was reminded of the comment made by a New York matron who, seeing a picture of Truman Capote couchant, declared: "Daisy, if that's a child, he's dangerous."

Jessie Buckley lends Mozart's wife, Constanze, a touching, practical earthiness and Simon Jones, John Standing and Richard Clifford invest the Austrian Emperor and his court officials with a detail the writing sometimes lacks. Amadeus is not unflawed; but, in its musical structure and outsize passions, it provides playgoers with the sensual delights of grand opera.